Have you been "trained" lately? Maybe you are a trainer? Seen a trainer? Sent people off to do training? Visited a "training centre? If any of these things apply: shame on you!! Training is the very last thing you, I, or we, need at this stage of our economic development.

Unless you work with lions in a cage, are a mime at a tourist site, aspire to be a professional dog-handler, or merely going out for a run, training is not for you. Training is for short-cycle, highly-repetitive, learnable skills that tend to be invariant in their application. You "train" someone to answer the phone, for example; or to fold a napkin. This is all about variance reduction; which is not to say that it is not important. We are all the beneficiaries of the Industrial Revolution; 200+ years of determined variance reduction. Not a bad track-record for "training", since much of what the Industrial Revolution was built upon were short-cycle, highly-repetitive tasks; think: assembly line work.

Often it is not so much that the planning for change is incorrect, as it is that the impetus for change is slowed, either by forces that resist change or are indifferent to an initiative, or by an insufficient motive force inside the leadership team to push the initiative forward in the face of hesitation. This is leadership failure, not management failure, and is often associated with three leadership requirements that we frequently see missing in discussions of big change efforts:

Changing mindsets begins with you! The only mind you can be sure of changing is your own, and the only way that you can demonstrate this mindset change is through your behaviors. If you aspire for your organization to be faster, more innovative, less afraid of failure, it has to begin by you being faster, more involved in innovation and being willing to be the failure role-model. If you won’t try it, why should anyone else who works for you? Read more: http://www.forbes.com/sites/billfischer/2015/03/19/are-you-an-analog-or-digital-leader/#6fdee8122782

What if what you know didn’t matter anymore? What if knowledge became a commodity? What if everyone could be an expert?

Far-fetched, you think? Well, in fact, the “what if” is no longer speculative; it is here already. Talk to people in such professional service industries as private banking, auditing, consulting, even engineering, and you begin to hear concerns about the commoditization of professional knowledge.